Abstract: K17.00001 : Galileo as an intellectual heretic and why that matters

Author:

Paolo Palmieri(University of Pittsburgh)

What was physics like before Galileo? Five centuries ago physics was taught
in universities all over Europe as part of a broader field of knowledge
known as natural philosophy. It was neither quantitative, nor experimental,
but mostly an a-priori, logical type of inquiry about principles concerning
notions such as space, time, and motion, from which deductions could be made
about the natural world. Galileo changed all that. He claimed that inquiry
about nature should be experimental, and that reasoning in natural
philosophy should be mathematical. It was a bold enough move. But Galileo's
intellectual heresy was the discovery that knowledge of the natural world
could only be achieved by relaxing the requirement that principles be known
with absolute certainty. He demonstrated that a new mathematical physics
could be built upon principles based on experiment. Thus the new physics
could be extended recklessly by starting from less than certain foundations.
Galileo's startling insight was that scientific truth need not be localized
but can be diffused throughout the structure of science.

To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2014.APR.K17.1